emprise,
Wears evermore the seal of his believing
Deep in the dark of solitary eyes,

Yea to the end, in palace or in prison,
Fashions his fancies of the realm to be,
Fallen from the height or from the deeps arisen,
Ringed with the rocks and sundered of the sea;--

So even I, and with a heart more burning,
So even I, and with a hope more sweet,
Groan for the hour, O Christ! of Thy returning,
Faint for the flaming of Thine advent feet."
F.W.H. MYERS, _Saint Paul_.

* * * * *

XIV

CONCERNING THE SECOND ADVENT

"_They shall see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven
with power and great glory.... Of that day and hour knoweth no
one, not even the angels of heaven, neither the Son, but the
Father only."_--MATT. xxiv. 30, 36.

The doctrine of our Lord's Second Coming occupies at the present moment
a curiously equivocal position in the thought of the Christian Church.
On the one hand by many it is wholly ignored. There is no conscious
disloyalty on their part to the word of God; but the subject makes no
appeal to them, it fails to "find" them. Ours is a sternly practical
age, and any truth which does not readily link itself on to the
necessities of life is liable speedily to be put on one side and
forgotten. This is what has happened with this particular doctrine in
the case of multitudes; it is not denied, but it is banished to what Mr.
Lecky calls "the land of the unrealized and the inoperative." But if, on
the one hand, the doctrine has suffered from neglect, on the other it
has suffered hardly less from undue attention. Indeed of late years the
whole subject of the "Last Things" has been turned into a kind of happy
hunting-ground for little sects, who carry on a ceaseless wordy warfare
both with themselves and the rest of the Christian world. Men and women
without another theological interest in the world are yet keen to argue
about Millenarianism, and to try their 'prentice hands on the
interpretation of the imagery of the apocalyptic literature of both the
Old Testament and the New. As Spurgeon used to say, they are so taken up
with the second coming of our Lord that they forget to preach the first
So that one hardly knows which to regret more, the neglect and
indifference of the one class, or the unhealthy, feverish absorption of
the other.

As very often happens in cases of this